Australian Actor Luke Bracey Is Surfing a Wave with The November Man, The Best of Me, and Point Break

Australian Actor Luke Bracey Is Surfing a Wave with The November Man, The Best of Me, and Point Break

Photo: Photograph by Jeff Burton.

Photo: Photograph by Jeff Burton.

Photo: Photograph by Jeff Burton.

Photograph by Jeff Burton.

Photograph by Jeff Burton.

Photograph by Jeff Burton.

Since its first episode, in 1988, the Australian soap opera Home and Away has been a heartthrob incubator, launching the careers of some of our country's favorite hunks: Heath Ledger, Guy Pearce, Chris and Liam Hemsworth, and now 25-year-old Luke Bracey. The dirty-blond, green-eyed stunner and Sydney native was just out of high school when a successful television producer asked him to audition for one of his shows. Though he'd just made a deal to play Rugby for a local team, he agreed to read for the part. Bracey didn't nab the role, but when the casting director from that series later called him to audition for Home and Away, he landed it. “I had to tell my dad I wasn't going to be working as a builder for him anymore,” he recalls. “It's not every day that you get asked to be on TV.” Two years and 225 episodes later, the actor moved from the Gold Coast to the West Coast and quickly established himself as one to watch among Young Hollywood. Out last summer: The November Man, in which he plays a C.I.A. agent alongside Pierce Brosnan. This month, he appears in The Best of Me, by king of weepies Nicholas Sparks.

These days, Bracey is motorbiking, surfing, and rock-climbing his way through a world tour to film his role as undercover cop turned surfer Johnny Utah in the reboot of Kathryn Bigelow's iconic 1991 film, Point Break. Having learned to surf before he could walk, the lifelong super-fan of the original was entirely nerve-free about filling Keanu Reeves's shoes. Well, almost entirely. “I was so excited by the idea of being in the movie that I skipped over the apprehension,” he said. “Then it hit me, like, Oh, my God—I don't want to screw this up. At the same time, I love it so much that at least it will come from trying my absolute darndest not to.”